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1910 
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COPYRIGHT DEPOSlli 



THE BREED AND 
THE PASTURE 



BY 

J. LENOIR CHAMBERS 



Cfjarlotte, M. C: 

STONE & BARRINGER COMPANY 

19 10 






COPYRIGHT 1910 
By J. IvENOIR CHAMBERS 



/Besses Observer Printins House (Jnc.) Charlotte, N. C. 



(gCl.A25G10J) 



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a ODfjfe little tjoofe, tufjicfi 
fjasi been to me a labor 
of lobe, 3 trebicate to 
mp cfjilbren 



The Breed and the Pasture 

MY BLUE MOUNTAINS ONCE MORE 

ijjR)jO MANY of those who are engaged in 
)^\ the active and exacting work of modern 
business life there comes a time when 
it seems necessary to lay down the burden, 
for a brief period at least, and escape to differ- 
ent surroundings. Under these conditions one 
turns to quiet places, to green woods, to lazy 
villages. After resisting for weeks this 
demand of nature for rest, I announced to 
my family, one hot July evening, that I was 
going away the next morning. Where? I 
didn't know and didn't much care; I only 
knew that I wanted to go to the mountains. 
I was born in the mountains, and the pictures 
of rest that I had recently allowed myself to 
draw were all surrounded by the blue haze 
which covers their distant sides and peaks. 
I recalled that the occasional glimpses of 
them I had caught from car windows always 
revived my spirits as nothing else did except 



6 The Breed cmd The Pasture. 

the refreshing breezes that came through these 
same car windows from their hazy tops. 

At the station I would have to decide where 
I should go — but I didn't. I took a looo-mile 
ticket and left the question open. It seemed 
just then as if I hadn't done anything but 
decide things since I was a boy — that respon- 
sibility which I never sought had always been 
thrust upon me. After all, it is the man who 
must say yes or no — on whom the real burden 
rests, and those who easily and quickly fix 
the dates and directions of their personal move- 
ments have generally put themselves before 
their work. At all events, I satisfied myself 
with this reflection. There was a transfer to 
be made, so I settled nothing when the con- 
ductor came around except my own body in 
a comfortable seat. 

For that form of restless endeavor which 
comes from the habit of work and urges on 
the tired brain and nerves I know of noth- 
ing so soothing as a ride in a railway train, 
for under no other conditions can one sit so 
still or think so little, unless, of course, it is 



My Blue Mountains Once More. 7 

one of these little trips a business man takes 
with a distinct object to be accomplished at 
the journey's end. I had no object and no 
destination, as yet, and so I let myself drift. 
I had travelled over that road many times 
as a boy, and the memories of those days came 
trooping back, carrying me to the little town 
in which I had spent my boyhood — a sleepy, 
restful place. I remembered an old hotel with 
a long porch surrounded by trees, and with a 
little low banister in front. On this porch 
I had seen men sit for hours and talk, and 
when the next conductor came around I asked 
him to "pull" my mileage for Evanston. 

The remainder of the journey was spent in 
going over the scenes and incidents of thirty 
years before and picturing myself on that 
porch doing absolutely nothing, and I was 
more contented than I had been for a year. 
I fell to wondering if there would be any 
hack at the station, or if I should have to take 
that long hot walk I thought I remembered 
so well. 

There was a hack, or rather "the bus." A 



8 The Breed and The Pasture. 

smiling porter with a cap bearing the letters 
'^Minnehaha Inn" took my suit case and dis- 
appeared. As there was no driver in the seat, 
I waited on the outside and was looking at 
''the bus," thinking that of all the vehicles 
ever constructed for the transportation of 
man it was the most uncomfortable. 

"Rather an ancient carriage, that," said a 
man near by, whom I had not seen. He was 
dressed in a neat brown linen suit that looked 
as if it had been ironed many times, a panama 
hat of the same age and a narrow black cra- 
vat. "It came to us when the railroad was 
built forty years ago. Isn't that true, Jim- 
mie?" 

The question was directed to a young man 
with bright eyes who looked as if he might 
be the station agent. 

"My father told me," said the young man, 
after a long pause, "that his grandfather built 
the railroad from New York to Philadelphia 
and that same "bus" met the first train that 
came in, and has been doin' business at the 
head of the road ever since. It got hung up 



My Blue Mountains Once More. 9 

here during the war for repairs. After the 
surrender, Bill Hennessee, the blacksmith, 
wrote to New York to get a door fastening 
for it, and the man he wrote to said there 
hadn't been a ''bus" factory in this country 
since the Mexican war. It was a curious 
letter that fellow wrote. He said the man 
who built the first one of them got his idea 
of a nice comfortable thing to ride in from a 
combination of a gun carriage with the pic- 
tures of the chariots the Egyptians used in 
their pursuit of the Israelites." 

Turning to me with a countenance that 
hadn't changed in the least, he continued: 
''Why, wherever the Confederate veterans 
meet, they hire that "bus" and trot around 
town all day because the rattle of the win- 
dows reminds them of the battle of Seven 
Pines. Fact, ain't it Counsellor?" nodding 
towards the brown linen suit. 

''Ah, Jimmie, my boy; at your old tricks 
again. Why, here come the Misses Mary 
and Alice. Aleck, we will have several pas- 



lo The Breed and The Pasture. 

sengers. I'll ride up with you myself," he told 
the porter. 

The Misses Mary and Alice, blonde and 
brunette, with pink cheeks, were coming 
around the corner. 

"Of course you are going to the Minne- 
haha," said the one Jimmie had called Coun- 
sellor, addressing me. "It's the pride of our 
town, sir." 

I said, no, I intended to stop at Harbin's 
Hotel. The young ladies heard this and gave 
me a glance in which I thought I saw signs 
of pity. I caught a second glance, this time 
of inspection from the toes of my shoes up- 
ward, missing my face, apparently, certainly 
skipping my eyes, and resting on my hat. 
For the first time I remembered I had on 
clothes, but — they were good clothes. I some- 
how became conscious that there was a pause. 
The "bus" door was open and Aleck was 
apparently about to say "all aboard," but he 
didn't. Then one of the young ladies had 
business with Aleck off to the side. I heard 
the word Minnehaha. The counsellor did. 



My Blue Mountains Once More ii 

too, and one of the girls gave him that kind 
of a look which young men don't always 
understand but which older ones know is a 
summons. He joined them and there was 
a ccnference. Then they all came towards 
the door of "the bus." The blond young lady 
was saying with some animation, "I saw Mrs. 
Allen yesterday. She said they had a most 
delightful company at the Minnehaha. ''Mr. 
Gates," to the counsellor, "speak out; do you 
know of a nicer little hotel anywhere?" To 
which question Mr. Gates replied: "It is 
really a charming place for one seeking a little 
rest and recreation, — " Before he had fin- 
ished there was a whoop and a slam and a 
loud cracking of a whip, and then began the 
rehearsal of the Battle of Seven Pines. 

We had scarcely gone a block when there 
was a sharp clang of a bell from the driver's 
seat, and a sudden halt. The face of Aleck, 
who was standing on the steps, ceased to 
shoot up and down to heights and depths equal 
to the length of his body, and he said to me. 



12 The Breed and The Pasture. 

"Did you say it were Harbin's Hotel you 
wanted ter go?" I nodded assent. 

''Harbin's Hotel," he called out in a tone 
which had in it pity and despair. All the 
other passengers gave me another little stare, 
and then turned to look out of the window, 
except Jimmie, who smiled. We made a sharp 
turn, and the rattle of musketry was resumed. 

When I left the ''bus" at Harbin's I felt 
like bowing to my new made friends, but I 
parted from them without doing so. I knew 
I should see them all again very soon. The 
truth is I knew just what these people were 
thinking, as they knew, or thought they knew, 
I had no business stopping at Harbin's. Was I 
not born in that town, albeit many years be- 
fore? I remembered Mr. Gates well. They 
called him Counsellor then, as now. He was 
one of the beaux of the town and "came out" 
year after year with the young ladies whose 
mothers he had escorted to aances. As for 
the girls, I was sure one was a Foster and 
the other a Williams. I even located "Jim- 
mie" as a member of one of two families, per- 



My Blue Mountains Once More. 13 

haps both. It was, therefore, no surprise that 
''Jimmie" discovered as I left the *'bus" that 
he had business with the proprietor. Incident- 
ally, he investigated the hotel register, as I 
knew he would, and whistled low when there 
was no name there. I had handed the pro- 
prietor a bill, with the statement that I would 
be around for a few days and had reasons 
for not registering. 

I had come to Harbin's to sit on that porch 
unmolested for as many days as I felt in- 
clined, and I didn't purpose that Jimmie or 
the girls or the Counsellor should spread the 
news of my presence to my relatives and old 
friends. Evanston might have changed in 
many respects, but not in its hospitable atti- 
tude to visitors, even though they were 
strangers. 

My suit case was sent above, but I didn't 
follow. I wanted to sit on that porch with 
my feet on the banisters, and this I did at 
once. But before my eyes could follow the 
rugged outline of a horizon made up wholly 
of blue mountains, I heard footsteps approach- 



14 The Breed and The Pasture, 

ing. They were ''yimmit's,'' of course. I 
didn't have to look to that side to know that, 
or to go into the office a moment before to 
overhear a conversation with the proprie- 
tor, who knew nothing except that I had paid 
my bill in advance, and he couldn't tell if I 
was a lawyer, preacher, traveling man or 
special revenue officer from Washington — 
most likely the last named. 

"Jimmie" drew up a chair ten feet away 
and lit his pipe. 



m 



IN THE SMOKE OF MY NEIGHBORS* 
PIPE 

HEN Jimmie seated himself at an 
unobstrusive distance and lit his pipe, 
I knew that sooner or later we would 
be talking, and before he left he would find 
out all he wanted to know. Patience is the 
cardinal virtue of the dwellers in small towns, 
and knowledge, that is to say, satisfied curi- 
osity, is one of the chief rewards. I wanted 
to smoke myself, but I knew if I but struck 
a match as evidence of my intention, it would 
give James his chance. It is one of the inci- 
dental charms of Lady Nicotine that two men 
will sit for hours near each other on a rail- 
way train, for instance, without any commun- 
ication, and the moment they meet in the 
smoking room, conversation will begin. The 
appearance of an odd-looking character, or 
the passing of a mixed team, horse and ox, 
from the mountains, or any trivial occurrence 
on the sereet would give my companion his 
chance, but there were no such sights or 
sounds. A noon-day stillness had settled upon 



i6 The Breed and the Pasture. 

everything except the restless aspens over- 
head which were kissing their thousands of 
little green hands to the breezes from my 
blue mountains — breezes and mountains that 
I had come there to feel and see again from 
this old porch. God bless and keep them both 
for the rest and the strength and the hope 
they bring to such as I, for the velvet pink 
and brown they have brought to so many 
cheeks of the youth of Evanston, for the 
power they have given to the nerves and 
brains of men and women who have gone out 
from these foot-hills to fill the falling ranks 
of those who, in cities and factories, in labor- 
atories and counting rooms, are giving their 
lives to the building up of this greatest of all 
Republics. 

It is no new thing to say that the great 
things of the world have been done by those 
who came from the hill country, and I would 
like to live to see the day when the grandsons 
and great-grandsons of those who left the 
Piedmont region of the South in search of the 
alluvial soils and rich mines of the great West, 



In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. ly 

shall return to the homes of their ancestors 
and grow a race the like of which has never 
yet been seen on this earth. 

I have often heard it said that this partic- 
ular town of Evanston has been known far 
and wide for the beauty and the charm of its 
women, but less was heard of the men who 
lived there — that while other towns had 
advanced in population and wealth, Evanston 
had changed but little, notwithstanding a 
most stimulating climate and a location as 
favorable as many others. Knowing the 
stock from which its people came to be of the 
best American type, and that there had been 
no lack of education of the best the Southern 
country then afforded, I found myself in 
instant pursuit of the cause, following meth- 
ods which I had learned in my thirty years 
of business training. 

Because I found the facts concerning the 
settlement of this community of more than 
usual historical interest, the degree of intel- 
ligence that prevailed much above the average 
i.i the State, and because I thought I saw that 



i8 The Breed and The Pasture. 

this community really represented one of per- 
haps a dozen different types or modifications 
of a civilization that went to make up South- 
ern life as it existed before the civil war, I 
decided to set down the facts as I found them, 
and hence the origin of the Sketches of Evans- 
ton. 

Fortunately for the ease and comfort of 
the undertaking, I was old enough to have 
lived, or at least to have spent my boyhood 
days, in this community under the conditions 
that culminated in 1861. I knew every house 
of consequence in the county, and the bold 
outlines, if not the fine points, of each repre- 
sentative family, and many of the individual 
members. Even then as I sat on the long low 
porch of Harbin's Hotel by the end of which 
the children were passing, I was sure I could 
see family resemblances that were unmistak- 
able. A young man with the high cheek 
bones, brown eyes and confident carriage of 
the Carters entered and passed into the office, 
but as he spoke there were the unmistakable 
tones of the Pinsons — the hands of Esau but 



In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. 19 

the voice of Jacob. "Ji^i"^!^" called him Car- 
ter, and a moment later the proprietor said: 
"Good morning, Pinson," and I knew there 
had been a marriage between the Carter and 
Pinson families. 

In some respects, surely, there is more in 
the breed than there is in the pasture, and yet 
I already saw in the picture I hoped to be 
able to paint that it was lack of pasture and 
narrowness of range which had kept back 
development, or produced a one-sided growth, 
where the breed was exceptional and the cli- 
matic conditions unsurpassed. 

And thus it came to pass that while I had 
gone to sit on the porch of Harbin's Hotel 
in idleness, thinking thereby to drown the 
voice of factory wheels and dull the keen edge 
of nerves which had been cutting to the quick, 
I found myself alive with a desire to wrestle 
with a problem which led into history, and the 
wider field of economic subjects affecting our 
life and growth as a state and a nation. If 
this town hadn't grown, why? What is 
growth, anyway? Surely not the mere accu- 



20 The Breed and The Pasture. 

mulation of wealth; and yet, for the lack of 
it, fine talents were going to waste for want 
of opportunity, and the greater the native 
strength and the more restless the energy, the 
more danger of discouragement, despair and 
dissipation. For the men there was only a 
limited amount of professional work, or poli- 
tics, or — emigration. 

With the women it was different. They 
had their homes and they made the best of 
them and of themselves. Abject poverty in 
the midst of wealth may coarsen and harden 
a woman, but universal narrowness of means 
but sharpen her wits and stimulates her to 
make herself and her home attractive. 
Especially is this true if she has back of her 
the memory of better days, and in her the con- 
sciousness of being well bred. It was a matter 
of common knowledge that when a young man 
from the outside world drifted into Evans- 
ton, and was fortunate enough to meet the 
young women of the town, which was not 
always easy unless he came well accredited, 
he was invariably fascinated, and if, as occa- 



In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. 21 

sionally did happen, he succeeded in carrying 
away one of them as his bride, he spent the 
remainder of his days wondering where and 
how she acquired the grace and ease of man- 
ner that enabled her to shine in the best society 
of the land. 

With these reflections in mind, I turned to 
my patient companion and said, ''If I am 
not mistaken this is Mr. Wilcox," and giving 
him my name, I told him frankly that I had 
come there for a week's rest, having been 
born near Evanston, and that I was sure he 
could tell me things of interest about the 
people, many of whom I had known. 

He heard his own name called without show- 
ing the least sign of surprise, and listened to 
my explanation as if it was what he expected 
to find out when he took a seat near me. 

"The women run this town," he said with 
that twinkle in his eye I had seen at the rail- 
way station. "Yes, the women run it. Was 
it that way when you lived here?" 

I said that, come to think of it, they did 
handle the reins to some extent. 



22 The Breed and The Pasture. 

"In one of the churches," he went on to 
say, "they can't take up the collection when 
the river is high." 

Noting my puzzled look, he paused and 
pulled at his pipe, and finally added, "Because 
the only deacon they have lives on the other 
side in the country, and the bridge has been 
washed away." 

Another long pull at the pipe, and then, 
"You've heard about our map." 

"Your map? No, I think not." 

"Well, nobody I know of ever saw it, but 
they say there is a map which has a white spot 
on it that covers the town of Evanston, and 
it is the only white spot on the whole map of 
the United States." 

By this time the pipe had gone out and had 
to be refilled and lighted, a process which, in 
deliberate hands, takes time. At last he 
drawled between his teeth : "It means that 
no case of consumption ever originated here. 
Bill Hennessee, the blacksmith, says," and 
there was a faint smile in the corners of his 
mouth as he continued, "Bill says it always 



In tJie Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. 23 

appears to him like there is more consumption 
around Evanston than there is production, and 
that's the reason everybody is so poor." 

Seeing that my companion was in the mood 
to talk, and was painting, with the brush of a 
gentle satirist the very picture of the good 
old town that I wished to get, I was careful 
not to interrupt his pauses. The best listen- 
ers never interrupt a pause. 

''It's hard to get anybody about here to ad- 
mit that any sickness ever starts here," resum- 
ed Mr. Wilcox. "It would ruin our biggest 
asset. All the new folks that come to Evans- 
ton are brought here on that account. People 
will do strange things for health — go anywhere 
and drink water by the gallon if it tastes bad 
and smells like a drug store. When they first 
come, they start out to show us a thing or 
two about building up a town and all that, but 
after awhile you can't tell 'em from the rest 
of the folks. Two old ladies came in last 
year who seemed to have plenty of money, 
and told the preacher and the doctor they 
wanted to lead a very quiet life. But the 



24 The Breed and The Pasture. 

ladies all called on them, and in a week they 
were going out to teas and book clubs and 
giving teas themselves. Now they never 
spend a whole day at home without company. 
For every man that moves off to some other 
town, we get two women and a half a man, 
and so we keep a-growing some." 

There was another pause, but this I began 
to understand was a way Mr. Wilcox had of 
making his paragraphs. Then again, "You 
saw how put out those girls were with you 
because you came here instead of going to the 
Minnehaha Inn. I figured out that you hadn't 
been in Evanston in a long time, or else you 
didn't want anybody to know you were here. 
Still, I knew you must know something about 
this town, for nobody would have told you 
to stop at Harbin's." 

This was a new road "Jimmie" was start- 
ing out on, but I saw whither it was leading. 
I had surprised him when I called him Mr. 
Wilcox, although there was no trace of it 
in his face. If his curiosity on that point 
were satisfied, he would go on talking about 



/n the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. 25 

present conditions in Evanston. If not, he 
would begin to ply me with adroit and indirect 
questions, and so I told him that I had been 
greatly interested in tracing the family resem- 
blances I had seen in the short time I had been 
there, that I had made a venture when I 
called him by name, and that I was sure the 
two young ladies belonged to the Williams 
and Foster families. 

This statement had the desired effect of 
inducing him to continue to talk about his own 
place and people, and he straightaway began 
again. 

I do not know how much longer my com- 
panion would have continued to talk about 
his town in that form of humor which com- 
bines extravagance of statement with just 
enough of the element of surprise to save it, 
but he was interrupted by the sound of the 
dinner bell — the tavern bell which was hung 
on a small tower in the rear of the dining 
room, and could be heard all over town. It 
had stood there for fifty years on the same 
four legs, and announced the exact hour at 



26 The Breed and The Pasture. 

which the guests of Harbin's took their three 
meals. A later and rival hotel built nearer 
the center of population, which is the same as 
saying nearer the court house, used a gong. 
The voluminous quantity and excruciating 
quality of noise which a jet black negro was 
able to extract from that insignificant piece 
of sheet metal, had filled my boyish soul with 
envy. I could remember the day when I 
would rather have played on that instrument 
than any other in this world with single excep- 
tion of the steam piano of the circus. 

Harbin's and that other hotel were, how- 
ever, alike in one particular — a certain archi- 
tectural appendage in the way of a row of 
one-story "offices," more or less extended 
according to the patronage of the hostlery, 
with a narrow balcony running the full length 
of the building. The almost universal exist- 
ence of this appendage to all taverns in old 
towns in the South is proof of the fact that 
the tavern depended, in the older days, almost 
entirely upon the patronage of lawyers who 
followed the Court as it moved from county 



In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe 2.y 

to county. In those rooms, accessible to the 
street, counsel and client could meet, and 
hence they are to this day referred to as offi- 
ces. Some of them that housed Andrew- 
Jackson may be yet standing, for it was in 
this section where the impetuous, headstrong 
young lawyer began the practice of his pro- 
fession, and in this very town of Evanston 
lived another distinguished lawyer with whom 
he fought his first duel — or rather went out 
to the field of honor to redress a fancied 
wrong, for there was no fight. His opponent, 
an older and more self-contained character, 
discharged his pistol in the air, and then 
turned upon Jackson and read him a lecture 
on his high temper and uncontrolable behav- 
ior. 

I have spoken of the noon-day stillness in 
Evanston. This was not comparable to the 
stillness of the afternoon, and I recalled that 
it was a custom of the inhabitants, widely 
prevalent, to follow the habits of the residents 
of warmer climates, and indulge themselves in 
a siesta — not on Sundays alone, but every day 



28 The Breed and The Pasture. 

in the week. It is true that there was noth- 
ing in the cUmate of this piedmont town to 
justify it, but the custom had been begun 
when there was little need to work, and con- 
tinued when there was little work to do. 

That a state of undress and bodily relaxa- 
tion dulled the intellectual activity of the peo- 
ple of Evanston there had never been any 
evidence. What philosophers they were, after 
all ! If we never stop to think, we rarely think 
to advantage, and if so it be that our reflec- 
tions lead us gently off into dreamland, our 
souls come back thence restored and calmed. 
Of what good is undigested knowledge, 
whether gathered from books, from observa- 
tion or from close touch with men and 
affairs ? 

I had lately sat at a banquet with a man 
who had come as a messenger from the great 
center of finance to sound a note of warning 
to his fellows in the South. He gave them 
the facts — showed them the needs, but had no 
remedy. Later in the evening, after hearing 
their calm talk and looking long into their 



In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe 29 

quiet faces, he arose the second time and said, 
''Gentlemen, the remedy must come to the 
nation through you who have time to think. 
We of the North are too busy providing 
against the Hghtning-hke changes of the hour." 

A moment later, with his eyes still turned 
towards the faces on either side of the table, 
he said, as if partly talking to himself, that 
if he could concentrate the thought of these 
men gathered from the adjoining towns, 
the financial difficulties under which he felt 
the country was then struggling, could be set- 
tled on a just and equitable basis. 

These and other reflections had come to me 
that afternoon when, following the example 
of the fine Romans in whose Rome I found 
myself, I had withdrawn my eyes from moun- 
tains and streets, my ears from the sounds of 
men's voices, and relaxed the strings we un- 
consciously keep taut to catch from every 
passing breeze whatever may help us in the 
struggles of a busy life. 



A HUMAN PRODUCT OF THE HILLS 



S THE SUN drew nearer the tops of 
the western mountains the streets be- 
gan to show some signs of Hfe. My 
acquaintance of the earlier part of the day, 
the counsellor, dropped in, as I supposed, to 
discover the name and business of the stran- 
ger who chose to stop at Harbin's, but instead 
he came straight up to me and abased himself 
for not recognizing me in the morning. "Jim- 
mie" had spread the news. 

A moment later a buggy, drawn by an 
ancient looking horse, stopped and a splendid 
specimen of mountain manhood, dressed in 
Norfolk jacket, alighted and tossed the lines to 
a small colored boy who seemed to have come 
up out of the ground. 

As soon as the young man turned his face 
towards me I knew he was a son of Judge 
Arnold. I think I knew that by the way his 
mustache grew. At all events, I was sure 
I had made no mistake. He came forward 
with easy grace and confidence, and, inclin- 
ing his head to my companion the "Coun- 



^2 The Breed and The Pasture, 

sellor," stopped in front of me, and calling 
my name and his own, he immediately pro- 
ceeded to tell me that his father, the Judge, 
had commissioned him to come and bring me, 
bag and baggage, to their home. The same 
old prompt and cordial hospitality, bred in 
the bone of the good people of Evanston — 
natural and therefore irresistible! Indeed it 
is true that "The glory of the house is hos- 
pitality." 

Four years before the time I first saw Elli- 
son Arnold a North Carolinian had been ap- 
pointed to a consulship in the Orient, and 
thither young Arnold, just out of college, went 
as assistant to the consul. It was an open 
port in whose harbor the ships of all nations 
lay anchored from year to year, vessels of 
trade and men-of-war. Each flag that floated 
in the harbor was represented in the port 
by consuls and vice-consuls and officers of the 
ships, and the English club house was the 
common meeting point of all. Thus it was 
that this tall Saxon found himself making a 
part of a picture composed of every type 



A Human Product of the Hills. 33 

of civilization on the globe, and set with orien- 
tal hangings. 

From this distant coast the young Ameri- 
can began to send back pen pictures of orien- 
tal life, and once the eagle had tried his wings 
and found them good and strong, he was not 
slow to seize the opportunity offered by a syn- 
dicate of newspapers for letters from the 
East. But before this work was well under 
way, there came a change of administration 
iii the Home Office, and the visitors demanded 
the spoils. There was nothing to do but to 
hand over the consulship to the new-comers, 
and consul and vice-consul set sail for home. 
It was here I found him a few months after 
he landed, with plans unformed, knocking at 
the door of opportunity, though not persist- 
ently; for youth with health and conscious 
strength is careless of the future. 

Shortly after I had seen him that afternoon, 
he was called to newspaper work, and five 
years later, before he was thirty-two years 
old, the body of this splendid specimen of 
physical manhood was brought back to his 



34 ^^^^ Breed and The Pasture. 

native town and buried in the churchyard 
where the remains of his people lay. The 
funeral cortege which brought him back was 
such as might have accompanied one of the 
highest officials of the land. 

When he came to me on the porch that 
evening in July he was known to one hun- 
dred or two hundred college mates as a bril- 
liant but careless young fellow who knew 
no fear, and who was the brain as well as 
the brawn of the college football team; to 
all of the people of his own town as a capable 
and brilliant boy who might do anything or 
nothing, and to a few others as the writer of 
letters to newspapers — letters that people read 
without knowing why. 

The day after his death, April 3rd, 1904, the 
newspapers were telling their readers that the 
most brilliant and promising writer of the 
Southern press had passed away. The story 
of his taking off was brief. He had retired 
to his room in a man's club, apparently in per- 
fect health. About noon the next day they 
found him in the throes of death. 



A Human Product of the Hills. 35 

His newspaper work had been instantly 
brilliant and successful. He couldn't keep 
himself out of it. That's one reason every- 
body read his writings — old men and young 
women, young men and old women — and 
when, a year afterwards, friends and admir- 
ers gathered together some of his writings and 
put them in a book, they were astonished to 
find it was read, admired and loved by those 
who had not known the charm of his fine 
pf:i sonality, nor cared for the people or things 
about which he wrote from day to day. They 
cared because he who wrote was so finely 
human and so well balanced himself that he 
detected every lack of it in human character 
ai.'d human actions. Thus it came about that 
he laughed with us at foibles, wept with us 
at misfortunes and enlisted our sympathies in 
every form of weakness. 

Things out of proper relation are humor- 
ous or pathetic, and sometimes both. That 
which great painters, great writers and great 
orators do for the world, and which makes 
the world love them, is to separate the true 



36 The Breed and The Pasture. 

from the false, to show us what our un- 
trained and careless eyes do not see, relying 
upon the great good there is in human nature 
to set at right the things that are wrong, and 
lift our souls upward to the better life. 



MY AUNT 

NOTE had come from my aunt saying 
that the news of my presence in the 
town had just reached her, and that 
one of her sons would have called to ask me 
to come to breakfast the next morning, but 
they had all left her to find work elsewhere, 
and the walk was a little more than she felt 
equal to, or she would have come in person to 
emphasize the desire of herself and her 
daughters that I should break bread in her 
house again. Where else in this busy South- 
ern country does one now receive an invita- 
tion to breakfast? What leisure there is in 
the thought ! 

When I entered my aunt's house, in res- 
ponse to her invitation, I found her and her 
daughters and another kinswoman in the 
midst of a discussion on the subject of the 
return of the Jews to Jerusalem. It appeared 
that the newspapers had lately reported the 
purchase of large tracts of land in Palestine 
by certain rich Jews of Europe, and a lecture 
delivered some years before by a distinguished 



38 The Breed and The Pasture. 

Presbyterian minister on the restoration of the 
Jews had just been unearthed. I recall now 
that notwithstanding none of them had seen 
me for years, my entrance into the room 
scarcely created a ripple in the flow of ani- 
mated conversation. They were talking about 
things, and things, as well as the people who 
talk about them, are far more interesting than 
the mere discussion of people. 

I was immediately appealed to to explain 
a prophesy on any other theory than that this 
was the method by which the Kingdom was 
to be restored, a subject on which I felt my- 
self to be profoundly ignorant, and on which 
I began immediately to hedge. But no 
account was apparently taken either of my 
ignorance or my disclination to take sides. In 
fact, there was only one side, for there were 
the prophesies, and how were they to be gotten 
over? One of the young ladies had them all 
marked, for it seemed that the discussion had 
been going on for days. 

Here again I was taken away from the 
whirl of factory w^heels and the everlasting 



My Aunt. 39 

rattle of wagons over stone pavements by a 
subject I had not heard mentioned in years. 
It was allowed to die out, only temporarily, 
I am sure, at the breakfast table, and after 
having answered the inquiries that were then 
made about myself and my family, I en- 
deavored to recover my reputation, lost on the 
prohpesies, by introducing a current topic with 
which I thought I was fairly familiar. I was 
listened to with great attention, but it soon 
appeared that they knew much more about 
it than I did, and when a little later some 
mention was made of recent fashions, I 
looked about me and discovered that every 
dress, albeit of the simplest material, was cut 
in the very latest style, and the hair of each 
was coiled in a manner I had just seen once 
on the head of a girl who returned from New 
York the day I left home. And when it 
came to the matter of the latest books, were 
they not all there lying around on the tables 
in the sitting room? Every one I had heard 
of and many more. Uncle John sent this, a 
brother another and some came from others 



4C The Breed and The Pasture. 

whose names, for well understood reasons, 
were not given. 

My aunt was really a remarkable woman 
— not merely a reader, but an absorber of 
books. A few people possess this gift. I have 
heard that President Roosevelt had it in a 
marked degree — the power to get everything 
there is in a book in half the time it could 
be read, line by line. One of the daughters 
said, that day, that a young physician of the 
town had lately secured an exhaustive medi- 
cal work, just out, on the subject of nervous 
diseases, and her mother had absorbed it in 
twenty- four hours, and at that moment she 
know as much about the subject as any doctor 
in the State. Her inclinations had run to- 
wards medicine and the neighbors sent for 
her before the doctor was called; but there 
appeared to be no subject which she did not 
seem to be able to master, and yet, again it 
appeared that for lack of opportunity such 
rare gifts were allowed to go to waste. I 
recalled that when a boy I had gone to church 
with her and discovered that she sang the 



My Aunt. 41 

hymns without a book. When I asker her, in 
childish wonder, if she knew them all, she 
said no, but if her attention happened to be 
given to the minister as he read them, she 
could remember them, for the time being, at 
least, and what astonished me most was that, 
with rare modesty, she seemed to consider 
this no great accomplishment. 

But the gift of acqiurement was only one of 
many possessed by this unusual woman : she 
had all the gentleness, tenderness and instinct- 
ive penetration of her sex, combined with 
masculine powers of comprehension and anal- 
ysis. I recall that in a conversation with 
her that morning she was telling me of the 
death and burial of Uncle Mose, a former 
slave of her father's, noted to her generation 
and mine as our greatest authority on negro 
folk-lore. She said that in repeating these 
stories to her children it occurred to her to 
give some study to them, to see if they threw 
any light on the negro character, and she had 
gone but a little way into the subject when it 
appeared that the Brer Rabbit, who figures in 



42 TJie Breed and The Pasture. 

nearly, if not quite all of the original stories, 
was the negro himself in his relation to other 
races. Brer Rabbit not only represented the 
hopes and fears of the race, but the methods 
born of them. He was not only not as smart 
as Brer Fox, nor as brave as Brer Lion, nor 
as strong as Brer Bear, but, in the language 
of the street, he generally *'got there." Being 
the weakest of all the animals, what he got, 
by hook or crook, was, in the vernacular of 
the tales, "his'n," and there is nothing in the 
stories themselves to show that any questions 
of morality ever influenced his conduct. He 
seemed to prefer to win his way in the world 
by good humor, by humility and by fawning, 
but once he got the upper hand, what a con- 
sciousless tyrant he was ! He did not seem to 
crave the courage, the strength, the intelli- 
gence or the other possessions of the superior 
animals, except in so far as these might 
enable him to get the whip hand. Envy, jeal- 
ousy and the love of wealth seemed to have 
no part of the life of Brer Rabbit. What he 
wanted was power, which he generally used 



My Aunt. 43 

for purposes of revenge, or at best for display 
in the presence of his superiors. 

Now that she has passed to the great Be- 
yond and sees face to face the truth which 
she sought with a power and concentration 
I have not seen suprassed, the picture of her 
that stands out boldest in my memory was 
made when she sat by me, after we had that 
talk, without a motion of her body, absolutely 
unconscious of the passage of time. The 
silence was broken by her making a quotation 
from a great writer, to which she gave her 
hearty assent, to the effect that no intelHgent 
man or woman could consider, without diver- 
sion, for the space of two hours the claims 
of the Christian religion without embracing 
it or descending to the depths of despair. 

This sitting still and gazing into vacancy: 
it is called absent-mindedness. Rather is it 
absence of bodily consciousness, and the very 
presence of the spirit that lies at the root of 
resolution, of the power that is creative, of 
the influence which determines which way 
the world shall move. The strong have it, 



44 "Tlie Breed and TJie Pasture. 

and it is the source of their strength. The 
weak may appear to have it, but with them 
it is only an idle dream, or the birth-hour 
of an elemental and unlawful passion which 
will carry them down before its superior 
strength. 

The process of thought by which my aunt 
reached the conclusion shown by her utter- 
ance was not difficult to trace, as I recalled the 
experience of that morning. Of course all 
folk-lore, and the songs of the oppressed, and 
those in bondage, looked forward to the lift- 
ing of the yoke. The analogy might mean 
something, or nothing. It only served in this 
case to open up the line of thought that was 
extending like an electric current all over 
the South, fed by the serious thinkers in every 
part of it, but interrupted by incessant coun- 
ter-currents from New England writers, and 
those of New England training and proclivi- 
ties, who enjoy the rare distinction of being 
able to attend to everybody's business and 
make a success of their own. 

Would education and Anglo-Saxon environ- 



My Aunt. 45 

ment create in negroes a conscience and the 
sense of justice and charity? I was sure my 
aunt reUed more on the Christian reHgion, 
and yet to those who like her had, all their 
lives, seen them dance and play, who had 
nursed them when they were sick, had been 
with them when they died, and had tried to 
teach them the simple truths of this religion — 
to these masters and mistresses only was it 
vouchsafed to know how often these people 
heard The Call of the Jungle. 

Up to the period of which I write educa- 
tion had produced little more than imitative 
arrogance, apish superciliousness, idleness and 
— green goggles! 



m 



THE EXTRAORDINARY LOYALTY OF 
A NEGRO MAN 

ELLEFORD ARNOLD, lawyer, mem- 
ber of the Confederate Congress, 
oldest son of Col. Iredell Arnold, 
of the most noted house in the county, 
a man in the prime of vigorous man- 
hood, a counterpart in mental structure of 
her who has been described in these pages 
as ''my aunt," who was his sister, had been 
killed in the next to the last year of the Civil 
War. While at home between the sessions 
of Congress a neighboring recruiting camp 
for the training and organization of a home 
guard was attacked by a marauding band of 
Unionists and deserters from the neighboring 
mountains, and the town itself was threatened. 
A group of old men and boys armed them- 
selves with shot guns and undertook to pur- 
sue and capture them. In a skirmish which 
followed, Arnold was shot and died a few 
days later. 

Being a lawyer, his own home was in the 
town. Twenty years before he had married, 



48 The Breed and The Pasture. 

at the State Capital, one of the most beauti- 
ful, gracious, and accomplished women of the 
Commonwealth, a daughter of one of the 
most distinguished governors it ever had. 
Their home was the center of the social life 
of Evanston, and much of the charm of it 
came from the exquisite tact and loving kind- 
ness of the hostess. 

The widow of Welleford Arnold was thus 
left with five children. Thus it was through- 
out that long and terrible struggle that the 
men to whom the depleted country might look 
for its rebuilding were killed, and the women 
and children were left with land and negroes. 
A few months later the negroes were free and 
the land worthless. 

Some twelve or fifteen years before his 
death and while sitting alone in his room in 
a neighboring town where he was attending 
a law court, Welleford Arnold was approach- 
ed by a fine looking negro man who told him 
that his master had that day informed him 
that he was to be sold to pay the master's 
debts, but had given him the privilege of 



Extraordinary Loyalty of a Negro Man. 49 

choosing his owner. He begged Arnold to 
buy him, saying with a dignity and force that 
were impressive, that if he did he would never 
have cause to regret ilt. The change of own- 
ers was speedily effected, and this man, Rod- 
man, was put in charge of Arnold's farm as 
overseer — a position usually held by white 
men. 

In the beginning he took orders from the 
master. In the end, the master, being engaged 
with his profession and with public affairs, 
heard reports and approved them. When the 
master was killed Rodman took charge of the 
family's affairs, and when he was freed his 
relations never changed in the least. Being 
hampered by no traditions, he was not cast 
down by the conditions of the times; he used 
them. He was in sympathy with his master 
and therefore with his cause, but being a 
man of sense with no sentiment except loy- 
alty to the family's interests as he understood 
them, he must have seen the hopelessness of 
the contest, and probably put away gold, or 
some equivalent against the evil day, for it 



50 The Breed and The Pasture. 

was known that Rodman Arnold — he retained 
the family name — had money to buy things 
with for the family and for the farm before 
the shrewdest men in the county had been 
able to acquire it. He lived in a well fur- 
nished house with his wife, who occupied the 
same relation to the family that he did, and 
tie'ther of them associated with other negroes 
except in a remote and superior way. Poli- 
tics never touched him, nor, apparently, reli- 
gion. It was said on the one hand that if he 
would leave the Arnolds he would soon be 
a rich man. Others asserted that Mrs. Arnold 
and her children would find out some day that 
Rodman owned everything and they nothing. 
But Mrs. Arnold always replied, in effect, 
that she and they had what they wanted. 

The girls were sent to the best schools in 
the land and often on trips of pleasure, but 
not before Uncle Rodman was asked about 
it. Schools and colleges were chosen for the 
boys after Uncle Rodman had said whether 
or not the family's income would permit of 
it. One after another the dauerhters were 



Extraordinary Loyalty of a Negro Man. 51 

married, and on each occasion he and his wife 
were given a prominent position in the group 
assembled around the bride and groom. 

The extraordinary loyahy of Rodman Ar- 
nold, colored, to Mrs. Arnold continued for 
twenty-five years, or until her death, and to 
members of her family to the day this is writ- 
ten, more than forty years after he was a free 
man. It was the devotion of a subject to his 
queen and to her offsprings. So long as she 
lived her sway not only held his loyalty to her 
person and her interests, but controlled his 
private life which was exemplary as a man 
and a citizen. The loyalty he nevei lost, but 
it has been said that in his private life the 
absence of her influence has been often seen. 
Through her liberal remuneration and his 
own business ability, he has acquired a com- 
petence, and is spending his last days in com- 
fort. Along with his own affairs he watches 
over certain real estate interests of the fam- 
ily with the eye of a lynx and the suspicion 
not inseparable from old age even in those 
born in a higher scale of existence than his. 



52 The Breed and The Pasture, 

Such an influence as Mrs. Arnold exerted 
over this man is given to certain rare and 
exquisite characters, the flower and fruit of 
the race. Its perfection is seen only in the 
white light that is reflected upon it by all who 
come within its radiance. She touched the 
rude nature of Rodman with a perfect trust 
in his integrity and loyalty, and the seeds of 
good that were in him grew and choked the 
tares. 

It's an old story, but one the world seems 
slow to learn: Such faith as we have we 
give. 



I CROSS THE BRIDGE IN THE SEARCH 
FOR TRUTH 



Y friend Mr. Gates, the counsellor, had 
always lived in Evanston, content with 
a small law practice and apparently 
happy enough if he had means to procure a 
sufficiency of spotless linen, which was his 
hobby. It occurred to me that a contrast of 
his views on the subject that was now upper- 
most in my mind with those of Ellison Arnold 
would develop something of interest, and I 
asked them both why it was that it had been 
said that the women were superior to the 
men of Evanston. The counsellor, an ardent 
admirer of the female sex as a whole, re- 
sented the intimation and straightway began 
to show that there was nothing the matter 
with the men. "Why sir," said he, "we have 
furnished the State a governor, two railroad 
presidents, a member of Congress, a supreme 
court judge and the most astute politicians 
she could boast of. On one occasion when 
we were making a big fight, there was talk 
of nominating our three most distinguished 



54 T^he Breed and The Pasture. 

citizens for the Legislature, Senate and 
House — and the governor sent word to one 
of his friends to see that all of them didn't 
come to Raleigh at once, 'for,' said he, 'if 
they do, they will move the State Capitol to 
Evanston.' " 

Ellison Arnold said that the town of Evans- 
ton bore the same relation to the rest of the 
State that North Carolina had to the Union 
in that she furnished much of the talent that 
was helping to build up other sections, and 
he referred to the fact that two of the largest 
manufacturing enterprises in the State were 
managed by Evanston men who had actually 
made them what they were, and that both 
of these men had left their home town with 
scarcely enough money in their pockets to pay 
railroad fare. 

It was shown in the course of that conver- 
sation that these two men had under their 
care five times as many people as there were 
then in the town of Evanston and the mills 
which they controlled absorbed more than ten 
per cent of the entire cotton crop of the State. 



Across the Bridge in Search for Truth. 55 

A long list was made of others who had gone 
away and made names for themselves in other 
Imes of activity, but neither these two nor 
others with whom I talked seemed disposed 
to look for the cause of the existing conditions, 
and as it was to this that I had determined to 
address myself, I decided to drop the agree- 
able and lighter task of describing the interest- 
ing people I found about me, and go back into 
their history. For whatever else might be 
said of them, they all had one characteristic 
in common — the habit of being entertaining — 
an art it was, and is — one which it seemed to 
me then the people of some other parts of 
the State were beginnig to lose, which many 
of those who live to the North of us have 
almost wholly lost. It does not go with 
much money nor with a busy life and does not 
come immediately after either. ''It is a giving, 
not getting, and the best kind of giving, for it 
is the giving of a part of one's self." 



THE DEATH OF WILLIAM IV. 

ROUND the town of Evanston, a mile 
or more away and far below it, flows 



a river with a soft Indian name. On 
its far side the level land extends back to the 
foothills, at some places a mile and a half. 
It must be seven miles or more from the 
point where the stream first pours against 
this promontory on the west, its strength of 
mountain current, to that on the east where 
it steals away from it under cover of the 
overhanging green along its banks, baffled but 
unconquered. Across the level bottom lands 
on the edge of the hills stand the homes of 
those who owned this richly productive soil, 
each house having a name of its own — Mim- 
osa, Deer Ponds, Missionary Meadows, River 
Side, Belmont and others more musical or less 
suggestive. The architecture of the oldest of 
these houses gives no suggestion of the Col- 
onial style prevalent in the old Virginia 
homes. The men who built them had not 
come from Virginia. They had filtered down 
from the edge of New England or from 



58 The Breed and The Pasture. 

Pennsylvania or Maryland to the coast first, 
and thence followed the streams towards their 
sources in search of rich soil. Only inciden- 
tally did they seek a good climate, for with 
pioneers physical comfort has ever been a 
secondary consideration. The houses were 
rather suggestive of old England, in that they 
were, for the most part, built close to the 
ground and without porches. In warm 
weather the occupants took out the chairs and 
sat under the trees. The oldest, Belmont, had 
no passage (now known by the name of 
hall) through the house, but the whole of one 
end of the building was one large room — the 
old English hall, where the master formally 
received his guests, or held his court, if he 
w^ere clothed with magisterial authority. An- 
other, that of Deer Ponds, a more recent 
structure, was marked by the number of its 
gables — not quite ''The House of Seven 
Gables," but enough dormer windows to make 
up for the deficiency. With the single excep- 
tion of Belmont, none of these old houses sat 
on a hill, but near the foot in proximity to 



The Death of William IV. 59 

the cultivated bottom lands, and close to a 
stream from which the live stock could be 
supplied with water. The owner and builder 
of Belmont may have had an eye to the beauty 
of blue mountains, for the whole line of the 
Blue Ridge w^as visible from the elevation on 
which he reared his home, but it is more likely 
that this was due to the fact that his fields 
of waving wheat and corn lay in the lowlands 
along the two rivers that converge there and 
come together a half mile to the east of the 
house. 

It was at Belmont that an incident occurred 
that was described to me during the early part 
of my stay in Evanston, by Col. Burgwyn 
Gardener, who married one of the daughters 
of the house and was the only survivor of that 
generation. He was a lawyer, of fine address, 
polished manners and emotional nature, dis- 
tinguished throughout the Piedmont region. 
It was said that he would have been offered 
a judgeship but for his dramatic and almost 
sensational behavior in the court house. Com- 
posure of manner is often mistaken for the 



6o The Breed and The Pasture. 

judicial mind, and those who lack it are rarely 
given positions of honor when the choice is 
made by their peers. 

Col. Gardener — everybody called him that, 
never Colonel without the Gardener — had 
made a profound impression upon me as a 
boy, chiefly, I think, because he always wore 
patent leather shoes and a silk hat, even dur- 
ing the war, and never spoke to me or any 
other boy. When we met him on the street 
the muscles of his face were undergoing such 
rapid changes that wc thought he must either 
be talking to himself or doing some loud 
thinking, and we stumbled over stones in the 
streets because our eyes were fastened on 
his mobile face and the flash of his white 
teeth, until he had passed us by. 

I had thought of him often during the in- 
tervening years, and particularly in connec- 
tion with a remark I had heard attributed to 
another, who being twitted on one occasion 
for some high color or extravagance in dress, 
justified himself by saying that it was no 
fault of his if man had changed the ways of 



The Death of IViUiam IV. 6i 

nature in which the male bird always had the 
most brilliant plumage. In the absence of 
proof, I am incHned to think it was said by 
Col. Burgwyn Gardener. 

When I met him now and he understood 
who I was, he grasped my arm and imme- 
diately began to speak of the incident to which 
I have referred. 

"Did you ever hear of the remarkable occur- 
rence connected with the death of Col. Elli- 
son?" he said. 

When I told him I did not recall it, if I had, 
he said that now he knew I had never heard 
it. 

''We had all assembled around the death 
bed," he began. "The scene is one I will 
never forget. The leading man in the county, 
the founder of a large family (for you recall 
that he had fifteen children, nearly all of 
whom lived to the age of maturity), a fine 
spirit, a brave and courteous gentleman, was 
in extremis, and all who could be summoned 
were there. Even now as I try to recall the 
faces of these friends and companions of my 



62 The Breed and The Pasture. 

younger clays, I always go back to that pic- 
ture. Near the foot of the bed stood Welle- 
ford Arnold, the oldest grandson. You re- 
member him, a young lawyer and politician 
who afterwards became a leading member of 
the Confederate Congress. He was always 
a favorite with his grandfather. His mother 
stood leaning on his shoulder, and just behind 
them towered the rugged features and massive 
heal of Col. Arnold, father and husband. A 
shock went through the bystanders when the 
dying man opened wide his eyes, which 
seemed to summon Welle ford, who bent over 
him. Then came the sound of a few words 
which none could hear except the grandson, 
who, turning to the assembled group, with 
infinite pity and tenderness in his voice, said, 
'his mind seems to be wandering at the last — 
he says William the Fourth is dead,' and 
when all eyes were again turned to the bed 
the Master of Belmont had expired. 

"Some two or three weeks later I met 
Welle ford at the postoffice on the arrival of 
the stage which carried the mail, and when we 



The Death of William IV. 63 

opened the papers we found the death of Eng- 
land's King announced as having occurred on 
the very day of the death of the master of 
Belmont. We walked together to his office 
in silence. There the details of the death of 
the King were read, including a mention of 
the exact hour at which his majesty expired. 
We made a calculation for difference in time 
and found it to correspond almost to the min- 
ute to the time at which Col. "f^llison made 
the announcement to Welleford." 



THE TWINS OF BELMONT 

ELMONT, Deer Ponds and perhaps 
other of the older houses had been aban- 
doned by the heirs of the original own- 
ers years before. The conditions of the times 
had carried them to the town. The last occu- 
pants of Belmont, who had lived there to- 
gether for nearly two score years, were a 
brother and sister. They were twins, and 
neither of them had ever married. They main- 
tained to the last not only the greater tradi- 
tions of the household, but also its minor cus- 
toms — meals at the exact hours of 6, 12 and 
6, summer and winter, whether alone or with 
a house full of company; corn meal batter- 
cakes for breakfast, exactly the same in qual- 
ity and appearance amid all the changes of 
cooks, and without a single break in a period 
of seventy-five years ; the presence of a pack 
cf fox hounds and beagles whose breed had 
not changed for a half century, and a family 
of cats whose ancestry was as old as that of 
the house; and finally in the regulations gov- 
erning the keeping of the Sabbath day, which 



66 The Breed and The Pasture. 

were only surpassed in their severity by the 
absolute and undeviating rectitude of the daily 
conduct of the master and mistress. 

These two owned the place and the property 
jointly, and whenever the smallest product of 
the farm was sold the proceeds were evenly 
divided. Each had a riding horse and a driv- 
ing horse and a servant over which the other 
had no control. Except on funeral or wed- 
ding occasions they travelled nowhere to- 
gether, because, forsooth, both might not wish 
to depart or return at the same hour. 

When the uncle wanted the presence of a 
servant, he stepped to the door and gave a 
call which could be heard at the remotest 
house in the negro quarters, a good half-mile 
away, and the awful tone of his voice could 
not fail to suggest to a stranger a fixed deter- 
mination to kill and quarter the luckless Tom 
or Caesar the moment he presented himself. 
But the negroes and the dogs knew better, and 
the cats rubbed their sides and stiffened tails 
against his legs and purred while yet he stood 
and yelled. The stranger knew better, too, 



7' he Tzvius of Belmont. 67 

when he turned and showed a smile on his 
face that robbed voice and manner of every 
suggestion of sternness or severity. 

That the attachment of the two to each 
other was of that close kind which may exist 
between twins, everyone knew, and yet it 
was believed that throughout their long lives 
together, neither had expressed it to the other. 
It was altogether too delicate and respectful 
for words, or even a caress, except that which 
came in the form of half concealed service. 
It is related that a tactless, or rudely mischiev- 
ous young kinsman once said at dinner that 
he believed his uncle loved his aunt. There 
was an immediate explosion at the foot of the 
table and a milder sensation at the head. Both 
turned scarlet, and left the room by different 
doors. A moment later an angry and startled 
voice from the big hall cried out, ''confound 
it, what are you doing here?" This was fol- 
lowed by a frightened little scream and the 
slam of two more doors, and the abandoned 
guests knew that in trying to avoid each 
other, they had met face to face. 



68 The Breed and The Pasture. 

It was afterwards learned that he spent the 
remainder of the day in ''the office," a little 
house in the corner of the yard, in one room 
of which he kept his guns and fishing tackle 
atid in the other, slept. He remained there 
smoking a pipe and unpacking a box that con- 
tained a lady's side saddle, of handsome de- 
sign and finish, bought months before, and 
intended for a Christmas present. From the 
b)ack window he held secret communication 
with Sam, his sister's servant, with whom it 
was arranged that the new saddle should be 
put on the back of her horse ''Gramp" for the 
ride he knew she was to take the next morn- 
ing to MacDonald's, across Deep River. She, 
meanwhile, sat at her window in the big house 
catching up some dropped stitches in a pair 
of warm woolen riding gloves, and watching 
to see when he left the office that she might 
slip out there and lay them on his bed. 

These things, and many like them, they did 
from year to year for each other, and for 
their dependents on the farm until the brother 
was removed by death. The old plantation 



The Tzvins of Belmont. 69 

had been left to them, and with it, most of 
the slaves. They cared for the slaves and the 
slaves worked the farm. They neither bought 
them nor sold them, but having them, they 
watched over their health and comfort, and 
did the best they could to improve their mor- 
als and raise their standard of living until 
they were all set free, and for many years 
thereafter. 

There was another member of the family 
associated with the later day history of the 
house, a little lady whose face must have been 
that of a Madonna, for her life was gentle 
and her nature quietly but intensely religious. 
It is known that she kept a spotlessly clean 
closet, into which, following literally the Scrip- 
tural injunction, she retired many times each 
day to pray, and on those days on which news 
came to Belmont of the birth of a male child 
in any of the numerous branches of the fam- 
ily, she spent the most of that day there sol- 
emnly dedicating him to the service of the 
Lord for His use in the gospel ministry. Such 
faith as this was not seen in all Israel, for al- 



70 The Breed and The Pasture. 

though she lived many years, she never knew 
that a single one of them ever engaged in 
that great work, and, so far as I have known, 
no one of them has done so to this day. On 
the other hand, perhaps without exception, 
the female descendants of the family have 
j.'cpt the faith in spirit and in truth, taking the 
lead in every good work, and building no 
home which did not have reserved in it a 
prophet's chamber. Thus it would appear that 
even this gentle saint, full of faith, knew not 
what she asked, but because of the asking and 
ci the faith, God has raised up and inspired 
— not public preachers of His Word, but — a 
widely scattered band of ministering angels, 
without whose Christian work and example, 
preaching would be foolishness, and the spread 
of the gospel would come to an end. 

A life of ease these people led, would you 
say? Far from it. The enslavers were en- 
slaved by their sense of personal responsibility. 
A hundred souls were dependent absolutely 
upon them, even for bread. In the present 
day we hire our servants and laborers and 



The Tzvins of Belmont. 71 

when we pay them, we are accustomed to 
consider that our responsibihty for them is 
discharged. Whatever personal relation may 
exist is cut off with the summer vacation, a 
change in size of the family or a desire for 
better or less expensive service. Oftener still 
the loose and fragile bond is severed by the 
servant who feels it less. The call of the 
West, the inborn spirit of the pioneer, appealed 
to virile and courageous spirits like Hadley 
Ellison, but their slaves tied them. There 
were iron furnaces and rolling mills about 
High Shoals, and cotton factories down the 
river, but the owners knew that these occupa- 
tions were too far removed from the soil for 
a race but recently taken from the jungles 
of Africa. Once when he was yet in the 
prime of young manhood Hadley Ellison, with 
his nephew, Leslie Arnold, and one or two 
others, actually did break the bonds and went 
to California. This was in the early 50's, 
after gold was discovered there. Notwith- 
standing the same government which had per- 
mitted the slave trade to New Englanders and 



'J2 The Breed and The Pasture. 

allowed slave holding in the South had pro- 
hibited slavery in California, they took a few 
able bodied negro men with them. The prop- 
erty they had consisted of lands and negroes. 
They couldn't take the land. To sell it was 
to part with their patrimony, and, besides, 
it had but little value, being yet abundant. 
They didn't wish to sell negroes and put the 
money in their pockets for use when they 
got there: they took them, in spite of the fact 
that the moment these slaves set their feet on 
the soil of California they were free men. 
Leslie Arnold died. Many of the others were 
attacked with an epidemic of fever that car- 
ried off many courageous spirits that had gone 
there from all parts of the country, and the 
expedition proved a failure. Notwithstand- 
ing that their owner was dead and they were 
free men, the surviving slaves of Leslie and 
those of Hadley appealed to the latter to take 
them back home, and master and slaves re- 
turned and again put their necks into the yoke. 
I have said that Belmont sat on a hill. But 
there were just such other hills around it on 



The Tzvins of Belmont. 73 

all sides. The roads which led to it traversed 
these hills in a straight line — up one and down 
another. Standing at the house one saw a half 
mile away a red streak which rose between 
the fields in a line that looked almost perpen- 
dicular. Standing at the top of that hill and 
looking towards the house, a stranger won- 
dered how any horse could climb it. But if he 
kept on his way down, his way up again 
seemed easier, and when he was at the very 
bottom, the difficulties had disappeared. 

I do not suppose there is a single intelligent 
human being who ever traveled over long red 
hills but has had this sensation and felt the 
lesson it teaches, and yet I do not recall that 
it has ever been used in literature by poet or 
preacher. Those who go down them and 
climb up on the other side are stronger every 
time they do it. Courage is largely a ques- 
tion of having done the thing before, some- 
one has written. Those who do it oftenest 
are the least afraid. Perhaps this is the 
strength of the hills "whence cometh our 
help." Certainly it is true that courage grows 



74 ^^^^ Breed and The Pasture. 

best on mountain sides and in the valleys be- 
tween them — the kind of courage that is not 
afraid of difficulties, that surmounts them by 
going straight over them, seeking no devious 
paths, nor needing for its support any human 
shoulder-touch. 



A GLIMPSE OF LIFE AT DEER PONDS 

Y FIRST — the very first — recollection 



of Deer Ponds was of a scene in front 
of the house. As I write this sentence, 
it occurs to me that all our first recollections 
are of things we saw rather than of those 
heard or felt, and yet I also remember that I 
was standing in front of a large, low window, 
and what I saw was seen through half -blind- 
ing tears. A dozen men were seated on horses 
that stood or moved restlessly in the semi-cir- 
cular driveway. The doorway was filled by 
the ladies of the household. Remembering the 
scene, I also recall that I must have been told 
that all this stir meant a deer hunt, and that I 
couldn't go. I must have seen them file out 
of the big gate and along the side of the big 
red hill, disappearing around the curved road 
that encircled its base, but I have no recol- 
lection of anything but the picture of the men 
on horseback and the women at the door, until 
I was patted on the head and caressed by a 
very tall man I had been told to call grand- 
father — a man with rugged features and an 



76 The Breed and The Pasture. 

iron-gray hair parted on each side and roach- 
ed up high in the middle of his head. What 
was that I heard? That we couldn't go deer 
hunting, but that he and Uncle Jacob and I 
would go to hunt bees, and I should ride the 
sorrel colt with a bright red blanket on it and 
a surcingle. 

There must have been tedious delays until 
all the preparations could be made, but the 
memory of all this has faded, leaving the one 
bright and glorious picture of the big man 
riding away leading the sorrel colt, on the back 
of which sat a boy exultant as Csesar or Pom- 
pey triumphantly entering Rome, while Uncle 
Jacob — a long-bodied, short-legged negro man 
■ — walked alongside, carrying an axe and a 
tin bucket — the axe to fell the tree, and the 
bucket to hold the honey we were sure to 
find in the hollow thereof. 

The big, strong man who, on a holiday, laid 
aside care and thus sought to console a dis- 
appointed boy, was Col. Iredell Arnold, head 
of the house of Deer Ponds, the most influen- 
tial man in the county, the host of every dis- 



A Glimpse of Life at Deer Ponds. yy 

tinguished visitor who came to the neighbor- 
ing town of Evanston on business or pleasure, 
president of the bank there, and leader of the 
best thought of the best people of the Pied- 
mont section of the State. 

A well-known writer of local history once 
published an account of a visit to Deer Ponds 
during the period of which I am writing, the 
decade from 1850 to i860, in which it was 
said, by the way of showing the royal hospi- 
tality of the house, that the day she drove 
away from its gates, her driver told her that 
forty horses belonging to guests had been 
cared for in the ample stables the night be- 
fore. Being incredulous, she made the count 
of the equipages of the visitors, and satisfied 
herself of the truth of the statement. 

In the house at Deer Ponds — or rather the 
houses, for there were two of them — there 
were sixteen rooms. The first one was built 
by the original Welleford Arnold, a lawyer 
born in New England and descended from 
one of the families who had come over to join 
their fortunes with those of the original Puri- 



78 The Breed and The Pasture. 

tans who landed at Plymouth Rock. He had 
been educated at Princeton, moved South 
when a young man, and was for years Solici- 
tor to the Crown in the more thickly settled 
portion of the State. This first house was 
stuccoed, and had sharp gables and dormer 
windows. The new one was built of red 
brick, and was of the square wood-box type, 
with enormous rooms and a passage through 
it that looked like a banquet hall. It was 
built by the present owner. Col. Iredell Ar- 
nold. 

Sixteen children had been born there, ten 
of whom lived to maturity — big bodied, vir- 
ile, alert and courageous — six sons and four 
daughters. The boys were all educated at the 
State University and the girls, for the most 
part, by special tutors or imported teachers 
employed jointly by this and other families in 
the town and neighborhood. Two of the 
daughters and two of the sons were married; 
the daughters having gone with their hus- 
bands to other parts of the State. One son, 
a lawyer, had settled in the town and another 



A Glimpse of Life at Deer Ponds. 79 

had built a home on a farm in the neighbor- 
hood. 

The house was large to meet the demand o£ 
hospitality. This demand was inspired by the 
desire of the owner and his family to mingle 
with the best thought and the best life in the 
land. The place was instinct with life. All 
guests were welcome, but none were enjoj^ed 
so much as those who brought from the out- 
side world a new thought or were able to re- 
port a new phase or a change of trend in the 
political world. 

Literature in the United States was still in 
an undeveloped state and the number of news- 
papers was few. Such as there were, confined 
their publications largely to official documents, 
and notable utterances of public men. A large 
table in the hall was always covered with the 
best of those then printed in America and 
some from England. Here the debates were 
held and the inside history of new movements 
was made known. These were stirring times 
in the history of the Republic, and the contest 
appealed to these strong men. The political 



8o The Breed and The Pasture. 

field appeared to them the only arena on which 
they could meet and try their strength, and the 
art of social intercourse which the Southerner 
of that day unquestionably possessed, found 
in such homes as this the best soil for its 
growth and development. 

The domestic arrangements of the house- 
hold were singularly free from ostentation. 
The furniture was simple, the table appoint- 
ments wholly unobstructive but necessarily 
abundant, and the servants were numerous be- 
cause there were many to serve. None 
appeared in livery of any sort, with the pos- 
sible exception of the coachman, who, on 
Sundays, when driving the family to church, 
may have worn the master's last year's silk 
hat. Few pictures adorned the walls. The 
lawn in front of the house was covered with 
unkept grass and planted with certain trees 
that then seemed to be considered marks of 
civilization — the china berry, the mimosa, the 
cedar, the white pine and the locust. Per- 
haps the only attempt at landscape gardening 
effect was a circle, thirty feet or more in dia- 



A Glimpse of Life at Deer Ponds, 8i 

ameter, of tall cedars, in front of the old 
house through which the walk to the front 
door led. On the south side was a large 
flower garden with some evidences of design, 
but chiefly noticed for its abundance of roses, 
snow-balls, crepe myrtle, jessamine, and other 
flowers and shrubbery now ragarded as old- 
fashioned. Like everything else about the 
place, this flower garden suggested the idea 
of being kept up solely for the flowers it 
grew and the service it rendered to the mas- 
ter and mistress of the place in adding to 
pleasure of their numerous guests. 

A singular illustration of the neglect of 
minor personal comforts occurs to me at this 
moment. Between the old house and the new 
there was a space of six to ten feet which was 
spanned by a bridge a few feet above the 
ground. Notwithstanding both houses were 
in use and the passing between them was con- 
stant, this connecting bridge was not only 
never closed, but was not even covered with 
a roof. 

The kitchen must have been a hundred and 



S2 The Breed and The Pasture. 

fifty feet from the house. The reason for 
this, no doubt, was that adjoining it in the 
long low building was the washroom, the 
"weave" room, a store-room for the products 
of the garden and orchard, and a sewing room 
where the clothes for the negroes were made, 
and it was not desirable to have all these do- 
mestic arrangements close to the dwelling. 
Flying black Mercurys passed and repassed 
from the cook to the head-servant in the 
dining-room, especially on waffle days, and 
most days were of that kind at Deer Ponds. 

The feeding and clothing of a constantly in- 
creasing number of slaves was becoming a 
serious problem to the master and mistress of 
Deer Ponds, as to many others. There were 
no idle rich here. The products of the farm 
were corn, wheat and oats, and it was all 
eaten up by negroes and stock. If anything 
was left it couldn't be sold, for it was a hun- 
dred miles to a railroad. Farming methods 
were crude, as they always will be where labor 
is cheap and abundant. The cattle that were 
raised on the fine grazing land in the moun- 



A Glimpse of Life at Deer Ponds. 83 

tains, much of which Col. Arnold owned, were 
brought down to the plantation and slaughtered 
to feed the slaves. In the summer months, as 
1 remember, they killed a beef every day and 
never sold a pound. Even the hide was tan- 
ned on the place and made into shoes by hand. 
The only source of wealth was the increase in 
the number or value of the slaves, and this 
was not available except by sale. None were 
ever sold. As they increased, more land had 
to be bought from the small farmers who then 
moved further up among the hills. Often a 
thousand acres had to be purchased to get a 
hundred of bottom land, which, with their 
methods, was the only kind they could afford 
to work. The situation was becoming intoler- 
able. There were hundreds of Southern plan- 
ters who would have freed their slaves but 
for the fact that such a course would have left 
them impoverished. INIost of them were in 
debt, and their slaves were their only assets 
except the land, which was valueless without 
them. Many had moved to the cotton lands 
of the far South. Others, like Col. Arnold, 



84 The Breed and The Pasture. 

were held by local attachments or the high 
price of these cotton lands. Sir Henry Lyell, 
the eminent English geologist, who spent many 
months in Alabama as early as 1846, tells us, 
in his book of travels, that even in the cotton 
lands, many planters with whom he spent 
much time complained that their slaves were 
eating them out of house and home, and they 
were then threatening to move on to Texas, 

On the heels of these changing conditions 
came the assaults of the abolitionists, which 
fired the South with resentment, and a peace- 
able disposition of the question of slavery was 
made impossible. 

England had freed her slaves twenty-five 
years before at a cost to the government of 
$130 each. The United States government 
freed them at a cost of $700 each, with the loss 
Oi 700,000 lives ! 



* 



THE FORGOTTEN WOMAN 

HAVE said elsewhere that the people 
of Evanston had the art of being en- 
tertaining, and I find its origin here. 
In the management of the affairs of the plan- 
tation, the man's business life was not apart 
from, but a part of that of his wife and 
daughters. The best development of both as 
social beings comes when they grow side by 
side in working out a common purpose. In 
modern American life among the educated, 
classes the tendencies are to separate the hus- 
band and father from his wife and daughters, 
often by widening the field of the man and 
narrowing that of the woman. The wife ac- 
cepts her fate, as a rule, or at most seeks to 
enlarge her sphere of activity by engaging in 
works of charity, or in clubs for mental im- 
provement and entertainment, but the alert 
and restless daughter of an active man of 
affairs finds few opportunities for growth, and 
little to satisfy the yearnings of every true 
woman's soul to do and be something in the 
world. Those of rich men are often accused 



86 The Breed and The Pasture. 

of selling themselves and their wealth for a 
title in the monarchies of Europe, but pene- 
trating women writers of modern fiction are 
beginning to show that while the traditions of 
the old countries appeal to the imagination of 
American women, they find their happiness 
in the enlarged fields that are offered there 
for participation in the management of their 
husbands' estates, and the building up of the 
fortunes of his house, when she is made to 
realize that it is also hers. In contrast with 
the impersonal and spasmodic charities she 
has been taught to practice, she finds the per- 
sonal care and moral regulation of a neglected 
tenantry. In place of the aimless and desul- 
tory reading and study of a city book club, 
she finds need for the highest culture and best 
mental equipment for maintaining herself in 
a society where the women are the compan- 
ions and co-workers of the men in the en- 
larged fields of statecraft and the delicate 
duties of diplomacy. 

At Deer Ponds the women of the house- 
hold took as much interest in politics as the 



The Forgotten Woman. 87 

men, and entered into the discussions of every 
subject that related thereto, and it is easy to 
see how the art of social intercourse was de- 
veloped out of the necessity to entertain the 
numerous guests of the house. On the lady 
of the house devolved also, jointly with her 
husband, the care of one hundred and fifty 
slaves — not only their physical well-being, but 
their moral growth and improvement. 

To the seller of cattle by the penful or the 
car-load, the attachment of the owners to 
the family cow is inconceivable, and the care 
of yoked oxen that help us to bear our bur- 
dens is unknown. To uninstructed childhood 
the crack of the ringmaster's whip speaks 
only of cruelty to the animals in the circus 
ring. We know the New Englander through 
his persistance in writing about himself, but 
he never knew us, or if he did he kept that 
knowledge to himself, for reasons of his own. 
Certain it is that his readers in the growing 
Middle West, made up of his own descend- 
ants and of foreigners from Europe, heard 
nothing but the crack of the ring-master's 



88 Tlie Breed and The Pasture. 

whip, but were never allowed to go behind the 
scenes for a glimpse at the tender care, the 
long hours of training, the unrelenting 
patience that even the rough people of the 
circus give to their animals. 

Over against the most brilliant canvases 
painted by the most skilful artists, but ser- 
vants of a cause, if not adherents of a fan- 
aticism of a period now long past, I would 
set this simple sketch which, if not painted 
by a master's hand, shows no line that is not 
true; which, if not representing the whole 
scene, depicts no isolated phase of it, but is one 
among many thousands seen by sunlight and 
by torch-light in cabins here and elsewhere 
throughout the Southern States : 

In the circular group of tall cedars that 
stood in front of the house, a temple not 
made with hands, sat a middle aged woman 
with iron gray hair and gentle face. Around 
her chair are grouped in respectful attitudes 
three score negro men and women in clean 
simple clothes, with a predominance of white 
about their black faces. On her knee rests an 



The forgotten Woman. 89 

open Bible, the simple truths of which she 
is undertaking to explain to childish minds. 
She is no preacher, but God has given her 
these simple souls to keep and train, and out 
there under the cedars, close to the earth, 
she points to the blue sky and tells them of 
a place of rest that comes at last to all who 
follow Him. And when their eyes grow 
heavy, she leads them off into one of those 
giand old hymns which carry on the wings 
of song the message of consolation and hope 
that often finds no other entrance to simple 
souls. Then all heads are bowed save one. 
On that pale up-turned face the sunlight is 
playing, God's smile through the rifts in the 
swaying cedars. 

This is the forgotten woman. She did not 
appear in the pictures painted in the literature 
of the times. If she had, the man in the 
sombrero hat, with the long lash in his hand, 
would have been unnoticed, and there might 
have been— I had almost said there would 
have been — no war. 

There were four million slaves in the South 
in i860. Allow a hundred to the family— and 



90 The Breed and The Pasture. 

the average was nothing Hke so large as this 
— and we have forty thousand famihes. Cut 
the number in two, and twenty thousand for- 
gotten Christian women were looking after 
the physical and spiritual welfare of the negro 
race — forgotten or unknown by her hundred 
thousand Christian sisters in the North, amid 
the shouts of the demagogue who sought to 
obscure the South's contention for local self- 
government by the cry for the abolition of 
Slavery; forgotten or uncounted as the spirit- 
ual force that inspired and upheld the most 
effective soldier that ever fought in any war; 
forgotten or underestimated as the power that 
held in check four million slaves for two 
years after they had been declared emanci- 
pated by the government that had authorized 
their enslavement, and again forgotten or un- 
reckoned as the one uncrushed spirit in the 
hour of defeat — forgotten there as a Chris- 
tian worker, and not reckoned as the unbreak- 
able support of her husband's and father's 
right arm raised in defence of the home. 
She is passing now, this woman who was 



The Forgotten Woman. 91 

so completely forgotten or never revealed 
there, who is cherished here as the best pro- 
duct of our civilization. Men of all types 
bare their heads before her as they do in the 
presence of no one else on earth. 

The finely courteous manners of the so- 
called ''Gentlemen of the old School" were 
not of his making but were created by the 
profound respect her high-bred purity and 
dignity habitually commanded. She is pass- 
ing, but she still stands for the best there is in 
Christian womanhood — the salt of the earth, 
the hope of our world. 

To the work this forgotten woman did 
there is at least one unprejudiced witness who 
comes neither from New England nor the 
South. I again quote from the eminent Eng- 
lish scientist, Sir Henry Lyell, a man who 
spent his life in the search for truth, the ex- 
tract being from his book of travels in the 
Southern States in the year 1846. He says: 

"Already their taskmasters have taught 
them to speak, with more or less accuracy, one 
of the noblest of languages, to shake off many 
superstitions, to acquire higher ideals of mor- 



92 The Breed and The Pasture. 

ality and habits of neatness and cleanliness, 
and have converted thousands of them to 
Christianity. Many have been emancipated, 
and the rest are gradually approaching to the 
condition of the ancient serfs of Europe, half 
a century or more before their bondage died 
out. All of this has been done at an enormous 
sacrifice of time and money; an expense in- 
deed, which all the governments of Europe 
and all the Christian missionaries, whether 
Romanist or Protestant, could never have 
effected in five centuries. Even in the few 
states which I have already visited since I 
crossed the Potomac, several hundred thou- 
sand whites of all ages, among whom the 
children are playing by no means the least 
effective part, are devoting themselves with 
greater or less activity to these involuntary 
ediicational exertions." 

But these and other things written and 
quoted herein are not written in defence of 
the institution of slavery. It was wrong, 
wrong, my children; but not any more wrong 
than that other legalized practice of buying 
from kidnappers and selling in the slave mark 



71ie Forgotten Woman. 93 

ets that may have stood on Boston Common 
and certainly did stand at the foot of Wall 
street in the city of New York, the helpless 
victims of man's rapacity; not any more 
v^rong than to sell a chattel, and when, by 
care or by new conditions, it became an in 
strument of wealth and power, to seek b^ 
force to deprive the buyer of the very instru- 
ments out of which the sellers had made the 
profits of barter; wrong it was and is to hold 
a human being in bondage, but not any more 
wrong than to make a free man a slave. Lib- 
erty is lost when the shackles are clasped. 
There could never have been negro slavery 
without the negro trader, and his place of 
residence was that on which his offspring, the 
Abolitionist, was born. 

It is not inconceivable that the same dollar 
bill or silver coin that was paid to the negro 
trader of Boston for an African slave was 
again paid to publish Abolitionist literature. 

I quote from no partisan source but the 
highest tribunal in the land, the Supreme 
Court of the United States, in the Dred Scott 
decision, concurred in by seven of its nine 



94 The Breed and The Pasture. 

judges, these words: 

"In that portion of the United States where 
the labor of the negro race was found to be 
unsuited to the climate and unprofitable to 
the master, but few slaves were held at the 
time of the Declaration of Independence; and 
when the Constitution was adopted it was 
entirely worn out in one of them, and meas- 
ures had been taken for its gradual abolition 
in several others. But this change had not 
been produced by any change of opinion in 
relation to this race, but because it was dis- 
covered from experience that Slave labor was 
unsuited to the climate and productions of 
these states; for some of these states, when 
it had ceased or nearly ceased to exist, were 
actually engaged in the slave trade; procur- 
ing cargoes on the coast of Africa, and trans- 
porting them for sale to those parts of the 
Union where their labor was found to be 
profitable and suited to the climate and pro- 
ductions. And this traffic was openly carried 
on, and fortunes accumulated by it, without 
reproach from the people of the states where 
they resided." 



THE SPEAKING PORTRIATS 

MONG other early recollections of 
scenes and incidents at Deer Ponds is 
that of a visit made to the house by 
Judge Boutwell and his daughter Francis, 
kins-people of the Arnolds, residents in the 
North. The judge and Col. Arnold were of 
approximately the same age — at all events 
belonged to the same era. Stories handed 
down from the other generation are still told 
of the curiosity and interest of the Northern 
relatives in all details of the management of 
the farm and household, and of the discus- 
sions between this man of New England stock 
and his Southern kinsman which took place 
every evening in the big hall, and often lasted 
far into the night. 

Of these discussions there are no reports, 
and more's the pity, for the two men were 
types of the sections in which they lived, 
albeit branches from the same stem. Re- 
flecting upon this fact, as I walked back and 
forth in the big deserted house, my footfalls 
resounding with the hollow, uncanny noise 



g6 The Breed and The Pasture. 

that echoes from bare walls and uncarpeted 
floors, I came at last to the room in which the 
portraits had hung. I could see on the faded 
walls the square outlines of the frames that 
held the pictures of those two — Southerner 
and New Englander — and as I looked, their 
faces came back to my memory with a vivid- 
ness that was startling — the one large-fea- 
tured, heavy- jawed, loosely- jointed; the other 
plump, crisp, closely-knit and keen-eyed. And, 
although in quest only of facts, I was momen- 
tarily lost in fancy, and fell to wondering what 
.these two would say if they could return and 
live a day in the future each had tried so 
hard, in this very house, fifty years ago, to 
foresee. With the faces before me there came 
also in flash light, the moving picture of the 
times in which they lived, that greatest crisis 
in the life of the Republic, the final clash 
of theories of government, giant spirits of 
the air in conflict among the confusing smoke- 
clouds of the approaching conflagration — all 
visible to men like these who stood on the 



The Speaking Portraits. 97 

housetops, but unseen by the restless pygmies 
below who were kindling the fires. 

Under the spell of this scene, I seemed to 
see the big, strong lips of the Southerner 
move, and to hear the deep voice utter, in 
the oratorical style of the period, words like 
this : 

*'In the present day the battles of the strong 
are waged in the marts of commerce, and in 
the wider plains of industrial development, 
with the result that, as a rule, our public men 
do not now always reflect in their own per- 
sons the full intellectual and moral strength 
of the nation, or, if strong personalities do 
appear, they often come with counting-house 
training and undertake to apply to government 
the principles of trade whose avowed pur- 
pose is gain; or, worse still, as personal rep- 
resentatives of a special group whose inter- 
ests they seek to guard and subserve. An 
aristocracy of birth typified, in its relations to 
government, by the House of Lords of Eng- 
land, is at least free from the purely com- 
mercial principle, being measureably satisfied 



98 The Breed and The Pasture. 

with its own conditions and surroundings, or 
if these be unsatisfactory for lack of means 
to support them, seeking rathei the remunera- 
tions of office than the prostitution of a gov- 
ernmental system to the gratification of per- 
sonal wants. 

"I grant you, sir, that the strength of a 
democracy lies in the perfect development and 
equal growth of each individual unit. Un- 
questionably the community life of New Eng- 
land tended to such development. The col- 
onists were poor, and each member had to 
work. With a free and intelligent people the 
necessity to work stimulates labor-saving de- 
vices, and, hence the origin and growth of 
'Yankee ingenuity.' 

''Settling in communities for mutual pro- 
tection, the interdependence of each individual 
member was quickly recognized, and the 
motto, 'In Union there is Strength,' had its 
full exemplification, if not its origin, there. 
Out of co-operation as a fixed principle and 
the habit of work grew thrift, general educa- 
tion and training, the savings bank, combina- 



The Speaking Povtraits. 99 

tions of capital in factories, and the other 
forces that go to make up commercial strength 
and independence. The extension of com- 
merce and any wide spread industrial growth 
has been followed sooner or later the world 
over by the development of letters. Hence, 
the universities of Harvard, Yale and Prince- 
ton, and the literature that came into exist- 
ence in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. 
*'But the same sunshine and rains from 
heaven which produce the flowers and fruits, 
ministers also to the production of the tares. 
With the development of a manufacturing in- 
terest, the greed of human nature demanded 
a protective tariff, a plant whose hidden 
roots extended to the remotest sections of the 
Republic, and drew from the products of 
agriculture the strength that belonged to that 
branch of labor. By the power of an alchemy 
within itself, this strength derived from the 
products of the soil was added to the value 
of the products of the factory. In the course 
of time the agriculturist was forced to seek 
other and richer fields in the south and west, 



100 The Breed and The Pasture. 

the one set resorting to the use of slave labor, 
and the other to the help that could be ob- 
tained from the immigrant peasantry of 
Europe. Left to themselves without the in- 
tervention of a protective tariff law, the 
growth might have been reasonably equal. By 
the aid of this tariff have come combinations 
and trusts, which, not only threaten the peace 
of the country, but have stimulated for their 
suppression the passage of laws inherently 
unjust, but hysterically demanded by the exi- 
gencies of a terrifying disease — laws of the 
nature of anaesthetics, but in no sense spec- 
ifics, and as full of danger to the state as the 
excessive use of opiates is in the human body. 
"The application of community laws and 
restrictions, beginning with sanitary regula- 
tions, limiting personal behavior to non-inter- 
ference with the comfort or happiness of one's 
rjeighbors — wise and necessary under the con- 
ditions of community life — led on to taxation 
for education, to further interference with 
personal conduct, to the infliction of punish- 
ments for the infraction of local ordinances 



Tlie Speaking Portraits. lOi 

based on a narrow and provincial sentiment, 
harsher than those in the statute books for 
the suppression of crime; and, finally under- 
taking to impose on the aggregation of States, 
prohibitions and requirements affecting the 
right of local self-government more tyranni- 
cal than those which the Pilgrim Fathers 
themselves fled from England to escape. 

"It will, therefore, appear that while the 
New England idea and the New England 
methods tended to produce and distribute 
wealth and general education, which are the 
objects of Democracy and constitute its plea 
for existence, this idea and these methods led 
on to a Hmitation of individual liberty and 
to vesting the State and the general govern- 
ment with royal powers and paternal func- 
tions. A man may become rich and intelli- 
gent, but he loses the very power, riches and 
intelligence give when he falls at the feet of 
Mammon or sacrifices a principle of justice 
for a theory of convenience. Commercial- 
ism made New England, but she fell a victim 
to its inquisitorial and sumptuary methods in 



I02 TJic Breed and The Pasture. 

seeking to embody in the laws of the land the 
rules of the factory and store/' 

The result of the conflict both these men 
had foreseen was not witnessed by this old- 
time Southerner. He had sent into it four 
sons, all of whom were officers. One fell at 
the head of his regiment in the battle of the 
A\'ilderness. A faithful slave brought from 
another a blood-stained paper scrawled on the 
Gettysburg battle field, with the w^ords : "Tell 
my father I fell with my face to the enemy." 
When still another, Welle ford Arnold, the 
eldest of the five, was slain near his own 
home by a marauding band of Unionists and 
deserters, as already described in these 
sketches, the brave old spirit sickened and 
died, but made no sign. 

His kinsman. Judge Boutwell, survived the 
struggle and, after the cessation of hostilities, 
gave clean clothes and money for transporta- 
tion to another of the sons returning from the 
prison on Johnson's Island. 

Turning towards the wall on which the New 
Englander's picture had hung I seemed to 



The Speaking Portraits. 103 

hear him speak, in clear tones and with the 
sharp contrasts lawyers are trained to make 
in stating a case, his brief analysis as follows : 

"Plantation life tended by its isolation to 
develop independence, by its responsibilities, 
strength and self-reliance, and by its leisure, 
fixed principles for the building up of indi- 
vidual character, and for draping itself with 
the refinements of culture. Undoubtedly the 
inevitable result of such influences is the pro- 
duction of a refined social order and a high 
class of citizenship. 

"The instinct of the race for the betterment 
of its condition leads it to look for its leaders 
among the intelligent and refined, and the 
history of the Republic shows that it was from 
among this class came those who nurtured it 
in the trying period of its adolescence. But 
they failed when the life of the Republic be- 
came more complex. Personal liberty and 
non-interference on the part of the govern- 
ment found here all the conditions for their 
gi-owth, but individualism does not meet the 
demands of a commercial and manufacturing 



104 ^^^^ Breed and The Pasture. 

people. The give and take of community life 
is essential to its growth. The one exalted 
the individual and left him to work out his 
own salvation. The other magnified the state 
and relied upon the power of co-operation. 
The one nurtured a class out of which grew 
fine specimens of manhood and womanhood, 
but it neglected the development of that other 
class which was unable to work out its own 
salvation. The other took from the richer in 
taxes and gave to the poorer the education and 
the training that utilized the talent of all for 
the enrichment of the State as a whole. The 
one conception was aristocratic and the other 
was democratic. 

"If democracy has its dangers, demanding 
for its control a stronger government and 
paternal care, aristocracy has demonstrated 
its weakness since the days of Greece and 
Rome, wherever called upon to deal with the 
complexities of an enlarged national Hfe or to 
resist the onslaught of an inferior race, inured 
to the hardships of toil. 

"I gladly admit the bucolic charm of the 



The Speaking Portraits. 105 

plantation life of the South and the high 
spirit and patriotism of its men and women to 
whom the nation owes an everlasting debt of 
gratitude. But the peculiar conditions of cli- 
mate and soil induced the use of slavery which 
touched its vital point and introduced a poi- 
son that narrowed the vision of it's leaders 
and colored their outlook on national ques- 
tions. Before its effects were seen, the think- 
ing men of the South had applied to the art 
of manufacturing and commerce that breadth 
of view and largeness of conception which a 
life of comparative leisure and a contact with 
broad acres may inspire. But the line of least 
resistance was followed. Wealth came 
through slave labor, and with it, self indul- 
gence and absorption in the extension of agri- 
culture. Manufacturing interests were al- 
lowed to languish, being obscured by the 
alluring possibilities of the single crop of 
cotton, grown only in a comparatively small 
area of the then known South, and demanded 
by the entire world. 

"When the centre of the sphere of influence 



io6 Tlie Breed and The Pasture. 

in national affairs was shifted from Virginia 
to tlie far South by the spreading out of en- 
terprising and active planters over the alluvial 
soil of that region, the nature of that influence 
was changed. Smooth stones lie easily to- 
gether, but the rugged and uneven characters 
that plantation life had developed could only 
be formed into a solid concrete by a powerful 
cement. In the beginning it was a fine patriot- 
ism developed out of British aggression and 
a common pride in the construction of a 
Republic, whose failure the old world every 
where predicted. In the end it was a mixture 
of the doctrine of state's rights, and a 
self interest, forming an amalgam more pow- 
erful in its cohesive quality than any elemen- 
tal influence or theory of government recog- 
nized in that period of our history. But it 
was not a mere solid wall of defense that was 
thus created. It was a live influence stirred 
into activity by the strength of its individual 
elements, and already trained to the exercise of 
power in the aflairs of government, and stim- 
ulated by the love of a social system full of 



The Speaking Portraits. 107 

the charms of a patriarchal mode of Hfe. 

"Southerners made a gallant fight of aggres- 
sion to extend their theories, but they fell 
before the increasing weakness of their sys- 
tem from within ; they fell before the growing 
strength of those who not only made our 
curry-combs and our blacking-brushes, rais- 
ing the art of manufacturing almost to a 
science, but who also wrote our books; they 
fell before the force of those who had fol- 
lowed Thomas Carlyle's gospel of work a 
century before it was enunciated; they fell 
before the slow moral awakening to the inher- 
ent wrong of slavery. They might have stood 
in spite of the neglect of the laws that control 
national growth; but they could not stand 
against these and an eternal moral principle 
recognized in every civilized country, except 
the one which stood for freedom." 

This is what these men in the portraits 
might have said, bringing with them the mem- 
ories of the times in which they lived, but it 
is not what they would say if they had con- 
tinued to live to this day. They would have 



io8 The Breed and The Pasture. 

seen, as it has been given to their descendants 
to see, that the poHcy of protection combined 
with "Yankee ingenuity" has constructed a 
machine so voracious and so magnetic that it 
has drawn into its insatiable maw the most 
virile blood of the land, so powerful that no 
hand has been found strong enough to guide 
it or snatch from under its crushing wheels 
those who may stand in its path; that 
strong and weak are relative terms, and 
those who feared the tyranny of a central 
government, because of its strength, are now 
beginning to realize that it is barely strong 
enough to control the different groups seek- 
ing the mastery, one over the other, in the 
mines of dazzling wealth our combined efforts 
have uncovered; that the laws of political 
economy actually no longer appear to apply 
to the conditions that confront our law- 
makers ; and no one man nor group of men 
seem to have combined the ability and unsel- 
fish patriotism to even devise a scheme of 
finance that will meet the demands of the 
times; that the members of the two great 



The Speaking Portraits. 109 

political parties are unable to agree among 
themselves on any definite policies, and, as 
a result, it is no longer a question with the 
individual as to which one he shall attach 
himself, but which one has for its candidates 
for office men who seem to be best fitted to 
deal with the chaotic conditions and lead us 
out into clear daylight. 

On the other hand, they would have seen, 
as it has been given to their descendants to 
see, that in spite of this apparent confusion in 
governmental affairs, the individual man was 
never so strong in intelligence, opportunity 
was never so great, the brotherhood of man 
never so universally recognized, and that the 
fruits of the gospel of work are ripening into 
the triumphs of man over nature, and the 
adaptation of her powers to his growth and 
development. 

Clasping hands, they would have agreed 
that as from the loins of a king only may a 
king come to rule over a monarchy, so true 
Democracy must create the man who shall 
control its tempestuous upheavals, and if it 



no The Breed and The Pasture. 

fail in this, it will fail in its mission. It will 
not fail, but the longer the delay in his com- 
ing, the greater will be the wrench to the 
nation. He will not come to destroy by rev- 
olution, but to save from anarchy. He will 
not prate about lawlessness as some scribes 
and Pharisees do, but uproot and expose its 
cause which will often be found in the in- 
justice of the laws themselves. He will not 
fail to discover that old statutes obscured by 
their very closeness to our eyes, are in their 
very essence inequitable. He will show that 
those who stand in fear of an overwhelming 
growth of socialism have themselves prepared 
the soil for the germination of its seeds by 
the laws they have made for their own con- 
venience and comfort. He will admit that 
liberty of conscience is absolutely necessary 
to human growth and human happiness, but 
liberty of action must often be curtailed that 
license may be restrained. He will show that 
it is not liberty we need, for that we have, 
but justice, and that the only way to find it is 
to get all the facts ; it is the scientific way ; 



The Speaking Portraits. ill 

it is the only true way; it is God's way, for 
He Himself can be absolutely just only be- 
cause His knowledge is perfect. 

Where will he come from, this product of 
two hundred years of democracy, of a thou- 
sand years of struggle for justice, this man 
who will be a type of the hundreds of others 
to whom we may entrust our governmental 
affairs? Who shall say that he will not come 
from a town that did not grow? One thing 
may with safety be predicted — that he will 
be of Anglo-Saxon breed and environment — 
this man of courage, of strength and of un- 
limited capacity for service. 



AN OLD BREED IN NEW PASTURES 
URED by the haze of my blue moun- 
tains, I climb them, and from the porch 
of a cottage built on one of the peaks 
visible from some of the streets and house- 
tops of Evanston, I can see back against an- 
other range a group of brownish green fields, 
in the midst of which the houses of the old 
town appear. The haze that was here is there 
now, but I see them because I know where to 
look, and I know where to look because I 
was born there. No true story of any peo- 
ple was even told or written by an alien, as 
no song of Italy ever came true from the 
larynx of a Norseman. The haze which is 
there hides from him everything except the 
fire works, and distance deadens every sound 
but those of the nature of explosions. 

From this mountain peak, and through the 
haze of the ten years intervening between the 
first sketch and the last, I ask you to look 
now at the last. The people are no longer 
visible at this distance; we see only the out- 
lines of things, bristling facts, results, and per- 



114 The Breed and The Pasture. 

haps among these some sort of answer to a 
question or two that may have been suggested 
by those that have already been shown. 

Here is one which stands out boldly, around 
which several others seem to be grouped: 

The day that President Lincoln's procla- 
mation freeing the slaves became effective, 
which was the day of the surrender of Lee's 
army at Appomatox, there was not enough 
money in Evanston and the surrounding 
county to buy the freedmen one meal of corn- 
bread and bacon, and not enough clothes in 
the stores to cover their bodies with a single 
garment. 

Financial panics, with their Black Fridays, 
hysteria and suicides, are but passing inci- 
dents, the full tide and the recession in the 
affairs of men, alongside of a catastrophe like 
this. The call to arms had not been louder 
than the appeal to sell everything and give 
to the support of the new government. Nor 
did this appeal meet with a response less ready 
or less universal. All of this was lost when 
the government fell. 



An Old Breed in Nezv Pastures. 115 

Even the flood which lays bare the land 
does not always destroy the treasure of its 
people, and earthquake and fire are confined 
to limited areas bordered by friendly neigh- 
bors able to redeem the remnants, to buy 
the labor of the destitute and open the door 
of opportunity to all. 

A less courageous or self-reliant people 
would have despaired, but there were no sui- 
cides, and, above all, no whining. Neither 
was expected from those who had the hardi- 
hood to enter upon a war without a treasury, 
and who undertook to fight without a battle- 
ship or a transport, without guns enough to 
equip the volunteer fighting force, and with- 
out a gun factory or a powder mill south of 
the Mason and Dixon's line. For this we 
would call them foolish now ; they were con- 
sidered foolish then by those who stopped to 
count the cost, but by this sign every martyr 
is a fool and every sacrifice a folly. 

Despair and hopelessness do not come to 
those who know or have learned how to en- 



ii6 TJie Breed and The Pasture. 

dure. They are the heritage of pensioners 
and dependants. 

Here is another bristling fact that stands 
out in spite of the haze: More than three 
bilhons of dollars have been paid out in pen- 
sions throughout the North and West to those 
who fought on the side of the Union. To ap- 
preciate what this means, one has but to re- 
member that it would give fifty dollars to 
every man, woman and child in the country 
at the time of the distribution of this sum, 
as the average population of the United States 
in the past forty years is below sixty millions. 
But since practically one-third of the popula- 
tion is Southern and received nothing, the 
other two-thirds received seventy-five dollars 
per head. Then again, since the average date 
of payment of something like half of this was 
twenty years ago, the recipients have had 
the use of this fund for that period. Money 
invested at a low rate of interest doubles it- 
self in that time. But this is not all: The 
dollar that was paid twenty to forty years 
ago had several times the purchasing power 



An Old Breed in New Pastures. 117 

i<" has today and brought double the interest. 
Not a single one of these dollars came to the 
town of Evanston. On the contrary, its peo- 
ple, with those of hundreds of towns and a 
thousand counties in the Southern States hav- 
ing no protected industries, paid it in tariff 
and internal revenue taxes, and got nothing 
in return. 

The amount they w^ould have received 
on an equal apportionment, to say nothing of 
what they paid, would have cancelled a thou- 
sand debts, filled the county with the best 
agricultural implem,ents and endowed its 
schools, even as it has done in the sections 
where it was distributed. But this is one 
kind of growth that never came to the town 
of Evanston. They had never been receivers 
of the Government's tips or beneficiaries under 
a system in which an itching palm is extended 
for a reward that has not been earned, and 
still believe that the care of a cripple is a 
duty of the State, and the nurture of an 
orphan a privilege of the strong, but the sup- 
port of the pensioner — now become a beggar 



ii8 The Breed and The Pasture. 

on horseback — to the third and fourth genera- 
tion of them that lost a leg, is an injustice to 
every American citizen and an injury to 
American citizenship. 

There was no lawful money in Evanston 
and the surrounding county, but there was 
still some meat in the smokehouses and some 
corn in the cribs. These the freedmen must 
have, or starve. A crop-sharing arrangement 
was quickly entered into by which the owners 
of the meat and bread, and also the land, ad- 
vanced the food until another crop could be 
made, and supplied the implements and such 
stock as the invading army had not taken, 
consisting for the most part of the lame, the 
halt and the blind. It was an emergency 
measure, but time offered no relief. Neither 
party to the arrangement could escape, un- 
profitable to the land owner as it was, and 
unsatisfactory as it appeared to the black 
man who wanted some visible evidence of 
his freedom and independence. In lieu of 
these he adopted the petty methods of diso- 
bedience to orders, frequent absences and 



An Old Breed in Nezv Pastures. 119 

other forms of annoyance known to a serving 
class, but rarely insolence. Of the part played 
in the encouragement in these methods by the 
agents of the Freedman's Bureau, I say noth- 
ing, as I am not writing general or political 
history. 

If the black man was becoming a burden 
as a slave, he was felt to be an incubus now, 
after ten years of freedom. The sale or divis- 
ion of the farms was out of the question. 
Neither the landlord nor the freedmen had 
accumulated a surplus. It would be a tribute 
to the time-honored pursuit of agriculture that 
it afforded even a subsistence to the popula- 
tion under conditions of operation which 
would bankrupt two-thirds of the manufact- 
uring enterprises of the country to-day, but 
for the unremembered fact that such sub- 
sistence was obtained at the expense of the 
land which was becoming exhausted and 
was gradually abandoned for new ground 
cleared from the abundant forests. If we 
ask for an explanation of the broomsedge 
fields of the South, it is found here. The 



120 The Breed and The Pasture. 

new ground where the crops are made is 
further back from the highways and the rail- 
roads. 

And so it was that nobody grew but the 
boys and girls, but while they grew Evanston 
and other towns similarly situated fell one 
generation behind in the growth of the coun- 
try at large, just as hundreds of the thriving 
towns in any vast territory of our country to- 
day would stop growth for a generation if 
every factory should be deprived of its tools, 
every store of its goods, every individual of 
every dollar he possessed, so that even the 
abandoned factory and the empty store could 
not be sold for any sum, however small. 

Here was a problem for statesmen, which 
like many others, was solved first by the peo- 
ple. The process was slow, but so are all 
the processes of nature that are constructive. 
It was also quiet — so quiet that it escaped the 
notice of historians, and those who were 
there did not see it. I asked the man of fifty 
years of age who sat by me on the porch of 
the mountain cottage, who had when a boy 



An Old Breed in New Pastures. 121 

roamed with me over the brownish green 
fields we both could now see, and sounded 
the depths and shoals of the river that encir- 
cles them. He said he didn't know. 

"You were there" I said "when the land 
and the tools began to wear out and when 
the stock had run down. What did you do?" 

"I went to work," was the prompt reply. 

"And your brothers and sisters?" 

"We all worked." 

I did not ask him what followed, for this 
I knew. The breed was there, but the pasture 
being poor, he had sought other fields, and to 
the new work of manufacturing he brought 
the strength of a powerful body and that 
gameness in the blood that carried him to the 
head of a vast enterprise. In the prosperous 
town where he now lives a stone church has 
been built as a memorial to his mother and 
father and in gratitude for the strength of 
body and soul they had given him. 

It had fallen in his way, along with his 
mammoth undertakings in other parts of the 
country, to reorganize and enlarge one of the 



122 The Breed and The Pasture. 

enterprises that had been started in the town 
of Evanston through the activity of its leading 
citizens, and I could see that its growth gave 
him more satisfaction than any other with 
which he was connected. He was helping to 
keep open the door of opportunity to the boys 
and girls of his native town — the town that 
did not grow, but is growing now because it 
is able to keep both its boys and girls at home. 
He did not know how the growth began, as he 
could not have told him he forged to the head 
of the leading industry in the State. He 
would have only said that he kept on work- 
ing. But it was such men as he who showed 
that there were resources in forests and 
streams as well as in the farm, and that the 
factory and the farm grow best when along- 
side of each other, both contributing to make 
commerce, and all to the utiHzation of every 
form of talent — to growth for all, because the 
pastures are new and abundant. 

The passage from one form of civilization 
old as feudalism, to another whose basic prin- 
ciple was widely different, was long and rough, 



An Old Breed in New Pastures. 123 

the crew was of mixed nationalities and those 
of a kind were not all of the same class — a 
disfranchised ex-slave holder, an enfran- 
chised ex-slave and the small farmer or mer- 
chant or mechanic who had not been able to 
acquire slaves — aristocrat, freedman and dem- 
ocrat — culture and intelligence, ignorance and 
incapacity, strong yeomanry in sympathy with 
aristocracy and prejudiced against freedmen 
— all in one boat acting under general orders 
from the central government at Washington 
still dazed by the heat and excitement of the 
struggle, the cause of which was never fully 
comprehended, suspicious of an enemy never 
understood, bent upon the enforcement of the 
one manifest result which was the enfran- 
chisement of the slave. 

The social problems were difficult enough, 
but would have found a solution had they 
not been complicated by political questions. 
The navigation of the ship naturally fell into 
the hands of the old masters. There was 
mutiny of course and harsh measures had to 
be resorted to. Those who by training and 



124 The Breed and The Pasture, 

native strength took command, being agreed 
that there are some few things dearer than 
life, permitted harsh measures, ordered them, 
and then threw themselves into the breach 
between two races to ward off collision. Re- 
ports of discipline, called lawlessness on land, 
reached unfriendly shores, always; those of 
the courage, the kindness and the sacrifices 
rarely did. Punishment was allowed to fall 
on individuals to preserve the peace of the 
ship, but the old masters stood between to pre- 
vent annihilation. They are still standing be- 
tween, and there will be no collision, at least 
not now, and not at all, unless the status of 
the crew is not fixed before the commanding 
but kindly eye of the last of them is closed. 

When we come to set up a standard of 
American citizenship — and surely we should 
some day have a standard — when we come to 
select here and there all the qualities that go 
to make up a man, it will be discovered that 
many of them had already been combined in 
him. It has been said that he has lost the 
larger outlook upon our National life. If he 



An Old Breed in New Pastures. 



125 



has, it was because he reorganized the broader 
principle that Government is made for man 
and not man for Government. 




EEC gO'^' 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



JAM 20 JBia 



